Weekly wrap: digging for victory

What a week this has been. Basking in the glow of a bright new dawn, Australia was overcome with a bracing sense of familiarity and realised it was time to focus on the things that really matter.

For most Australians, the week was spent in large part on getting to know our new prime minister. Having gotten over the shock of discovering she was a woman, the public was forced to deal with her other deviant proclivities. Perhaps the most unsettling of these was her revelation that she does not "believe in God", a stance that has worrying implications for national security, given God's significant firepower advantage over the ADF, and his well-known tendency to take these things personally. One wonders whether Gillard would have been so reckless as to declare she doesn't believe in Osama bin Laden.

It also means that Gillard answers to no higher power, now that Rudd's out of the way, and therefore feels free not only to ruthlessly grab power and make grown men cry, but to behave in all kinds of unorthodox debauchery in her private life, which brings us to the matter of the new PM's husband shortage and unused uterus.

It is only natural that when a new national leader rises to power, there will be enormous public interest in their sex life and reproductive system, and Julia Gillard is no exception. There was much comment this week around the fact that Gillard is both childless and not married to her current paramour, the ruggedly handsome Tim "Extra Gel" Mathieson. The question had to be asked: is the choice to eschew marriage and motherhood in this day and age recklessly selfish, or just malevolently immoral? There are arguments on both sides, many of which were made by well-known sex therapist and masculinist icon Bettina Arndt, who took a break from telling women how great sex is when you don't want to have it, to argue that although a life of promiscuity and child-hatred might work well for someone as ambitious and dead inside as Gillard, she should be more responsible in the example she is setting, given the millions of Australian women who regard her as a role model and are incapable of independent thought. In short, Arndt warned of a whole generation becoming lost in a Gillard-inspired epidemic of transient de facto relationships and wasted fertility, walking alone through life with no children to cheer their days and no man to make them feel their life has value, the way Bettina does.

But then, as Gillard also revealed this week, it's not as if her opposition to marriage is restricted only to herself; she is also opposed to homosexual marriage, possibly as a sort of consolation prize to God to make up for not believing in Him. The PM opined that marriage "should be between a man and a woman", relieving those who had been afraid that the change of leadership might lead to the kind of destructive social engineering and political correctness and respect for fellow human beings that has been known to cause major problems in the past. On the other hand, it shocked and dismayed those who had quite reasonably assumed that the replacement of one senior member of a government with another senior member of the same government would have naturally led to immediate reversals on major policy issues. In the latter camp was television personality and noted hairstyle-changer Ruby Rose, who was provoked into a furious Twitter tirade against Gillard, who may be reconsidering her position now she has almost certainly lost the hot lesbian vote.

However, this week also showed that there's a lot more to being Prime Minister than recreational sex and homophobia, and in her first week Gillard had the first major victory of her tenure, striking a deal with the mining industry over resources taxation. And so a great sigh of relief rose up from the people of Australia, who knew just how close they had come to having a government that decided its own tax policy. "Dodged a bullet there," voters muttered to each other as Gillard stood before them to announce that, thanks to successful negotiations, the big miners had agreed to allow the government to tax them a little bit.

The new mining tax, which has been renamed from the "Resource Super Profits Tax" to the "Incredibly Generous Voluntary Contribution Thank You For Saving Our Economy Tax", has several complex and unbelievably boring aspects, which, depending on whether I was awake when watching the news, could include:

A reduced rate of 30 percent

Exclusion of some low-value resources such as sand, gravel, and mud

A higher trigger point, rising from five to twelve percent profit

Scrapping of the tax break for resource exploration

Regular foot-rubs on demand for mining executives from a cabinet member of their choice.

Treasurer Wayne Swan, bravely restraining his tears, noted that the tone of the negotiations had changed significantly once PM Gillard intervened, especially in that in contrast to her predecessor, she never asked the miners to pray with her, and hardly ever called them "f**kheads" to their faces.

Of course, the new tax raises problems, such as the loss of revenue and the attendant necessity of cutting back on promises like the company tax rate cut and superannuation boost. But a healthy spirit of give-and-take is always necessary in such matters - if compromises weren't in the public interest, the practice of government winning approval from major industries before making policy would seem almost laughable.

But in any event, the peace between government and miners has to some extent defused one line of attack the Opposition had, so it's lucky that this week their leader came up with a new one, in the shape of new $1.5 billion funding plan for mental health, showing that just as an atheist prime minister can still govern on behalf of Christians, so Tony Abbott can make a commitment to mental health. Health Minister Nicola Roxon, however, disapproved of the plan, calling it "crazy", an insensitive epithet that drew criticism from Shadow Health Minister Peter Dutton and mental health experts, who pointed out that if true, it just made the need for extra funding more urgent. And so the question was asked, why does Nicola Roxon want to deny professional help to mentally ill Coalition MPs?

Speaking of which ex-prime minister John Howard was back in the news this week, as his nomination for the presidency of the International Cricket Council was blocked by African and Asian nations, sparking controversy over whether Howard was rejected due to his total unsuitability for the job, or simply because everyone hates him. There was particular rancour directed his way in India, where one new outlet labelled the long-serving PM a "closet racist", shocking many Australians who had no idea he'd ever been in the closet. Although political interference was suspected, it is also true that there are doubts about Howard's capacity to stay in touch with aspects of the modern international game - for example, 20/20 cricket, or the need to do everything India tells you to. Howard himself denies these accusations, saying he has plenty of ideas to "shake up" the sport, such as covered wickets and six-ball overs.

And so, from new prime ministers bringing warring factions together, to old ones tearing them apart, the week ended, with a sense of hope that our democracy really could work, as long as powerful politicians and obscenely wealthy plutocrats put aside their differences and work together to divide up the country amongst themselves. It's good to know we're in such safe, profitable hands.

Free trade is the oldest argument in federal politics and the issue that literally defined the federation era but opposition exists to the TPP, courtesy of the Investor-State Dispute Resolutions clause.